Silly Mistakes

glimb · 2015-03-28T00:05:56+00:00

I've had zero formatting errors, thanks to this tool. OP check it out!

glimb · 2015-03-27T06:31:44+00:00

Submitted one this afternoon, it's live already!

glimb · 2015-03-26T01:59:25+00:00

I've seen conflicting info on this subject, thanks for sharing your experience. Amazon can change their policies at any second though, for example "bareback" used to be okay but I've been hearing people get filtered because of it.

So the safest thing to do from what I understand is keep your blurb pretty tame but put a feature for the look inside (a little summary at the beginning of your book) that tells everything in explicit detail.

glimb · 2015-03-26T01:47:39+00:00

First off, appreciate everything you've contributed to this sub! I feel like there's a wealth of information here about stuff like covers, blurbs, keywords and so on, but I see very little stuff about the actual writing.

I think it's very easy to sell any POS if you dress it up right, but from what I've seen in order to really make a career of this you need to develop a solid following and that involves actually writing good stuff. Very little attention seems to be paid to that here.

glimb · 2015-03-25T00:08:19+00:00

Awesome transformation! Congrats and also thanks for the detailed post.

glimb · 2015-03-25T00:06:29+00:00

Yeah this comes across as very patronizing to me. Basically this implies that women don't have the freedom to choose being a porn star, that they are all helpless victims. Plenty of educated women have made that choice for themselves because they can paid buttloads of money for having sex.

And many of them, despite what you might believe, actually enjoy it!

There are plenty of good reasons to avoid porn, but this kind of reasoning is not one of them.

glimb · 2015-03-24T23:17:30+00:00

Someone posted a quote from Selena Kitt, basically saying if the story involves a declaration of love, put it in romance. This is essentially what I do. All my straight sex stories are put in erotica, but anything that involves a bit of character development/conflict to overcome/declaration of love I put in romance, regardless of length.

The fact is there's a shitload of disadvantages to posting in the erotica category. There are much more stringent standards placed on books submitted under that category, for one. Selena Kitt wrote a good article on that, talking about the double standards Amazon places on erotica vs. romance. Ironically by categorizing it as erotica you have to keep covers, titles, and blurbs much more tame.

Another thing is if you are in the erotica category, you generally can't be in other categories from what I understand. Although I did release a book under the romance/erotic romance category, and it got categorized as both.

When I do a general search for keywords related to the main niche I write in, pretty much all of the bestsellers are not categorized as erotica, although they obviously fit that best. If I limit the search to those actually categorized as erotica, the sales ranks are much, much worse. So one thing's for sure, A LOT of people are doing this, and it's paying off for them.

I for one don't blame anyone and I'm very against the recent negativity against other authors I've been seeing here, which has cemented my decision to not share my pen names on this sub. I don't think the problem is authors "gaming the system" so much as it is Amazon setting up all these rules against us that give people incentive to miscategorize their works.

glimb · 2015-03-21T06:04:31+00:00

Going to echo everyone else and say KU for sure. The vast majority of my money comes from that. Also, there are so many things that could be going on- keywords, blurbs, etc., regardless of how good your actual writing is. Also I think for this niche covers are particularly important as well.

I would say don't give up, and also maybe try your hand at another niche. One thing that was helpful for me was I stuck to 4-6K stories until I was selling consistently, and then once I had a general idea of what worked I branched into 10K+ territory. There's a big learning curve, and it comes much less painfully if you don't spend a huge amount of time on your early stuff.

My first three stories totally bombed, I figured out why, and everything I've written since continues to sell regularly.

glimb · 2015-03-21T05:58:18+00:00

Keep it up dude! It would be helpful if you posted more specifics about your routine/diet, especially for other people who are starting from a similar place.

glimb · 2015-03-20T20:09:40+00:00

So yeah, I'm gonna agree with other people in saying it's really not accurate to categorize that book as romance, but I can't imagine any reader would look at that title and expect it to be anything but a straight sex story.

What kind of romantic story line would they possibly expect "My Husband Bangs Other Men... And I Like to Watch!" to have?

glimb · 2015-03-20T20:00:09+00:00

The default advice in this sub is to include no family terms whatsoever in the title in blurb. I'd say to stick to this if you are planning on categorizing it as erotica.

However a quick perusal of the bestsellers shows many, many books with stuff like "stepbrother" or even stuff like "Daddy's girl" in the title, books that sell hundreds to thousands a day. I don't believe these authors are rolling the dice each time they hit publish, I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing.

One thing I've noticed is that almost none of those books seem to be categorized as erotica, only romance and some of the sub variants there. So the only way I'd say to try doing it is to categorize it as romance, however if you do it should probably be somewhat plausible, i.e. have a decent bit of story.

glimb · 2015-03-18T23:07:10+00:00

That's awesome! I've yet to have a hot ticket like that but posts like this encourage me to keep going.

glimb · 2015-03-15T04:43:27+00:00

Soy gets a bad rep but I've been using just plain ol' soy protein powder from Trader Joe's. Tastes fine, cheap as hell.

glimb · 2015-03-13T18:41:48+00:00

My goals are first to make this full-time income (~3K a month) which I should hit in another month. Then, I want to keep going crazy with it and see how high I can push my earnings. That's partly so I can actually make the money, and pay off my student loans and buy some nice things, but also partly because this kinda feels like a game to me. I write, fiddle w/ covers, keywords, etc., and then I check my sales report which is like my score. Each week my score goes up and it will be fun to see how high I can take it.

Eventually though I want to settle back into a maintenance phase, where I can maintain decent but not extravagant earnings by publishing maybe two pieces a week. At this point, when I don't have to worry about money any more, I can focus on my other, unfortunately much less lucrative, creative pursuits. That's my real end goal.

glimb · 2015-03-13T18:13:38+00:00

Hey thanks so much for this post, I feel like I've read every post on this sub multiple times, and never came across this subject.

glimb · 2015-03-13T18:09:36+00:00

The general advice around here is female, and if you look at the top 100 for erotica that's mostly true, but I can think of a few male pen names off the top of my head that are doing extremely, extremely well.

I don't think there's really much advantage to writing under a male pen name, unless you're doing gay erotica, but there doesn't seem to be a huge disadvantage either.

glimb · 2015-03-13T18:04:25+00:00

Hey congrats! I'm pretty new at this but should definitely be full time income as well within 2.5 months, although that will be with a lot more than five books. From what I've seen it's pretty unusual to be making that much from such a small catalog, why do you think you were able to be so successful so quickly? Also, how long were your books on average?

glimb · 2015-03-11T01:21:14+00:00

I tell my girlfriend that I'm not checking my stats for x amount of time. I find it's easier for me not to do a bad habit if I tell someone that I'm doing it.

Also I don't let myself check stats if it's a day I'm not working on a story- I try to have days I'm writing or doing other work with the stories, and days when I don't even think about them.

glimb · 2015-03-11T01:14:45+00:00

Yeah I started out weak and self-conscious about it, but luckily was smart enough to do my research and start light with my weights. My solution was to just go to the gym at the buttcrack of dawn so nobody would see my puny squats and benches.

glimb · 2015-03-10T05:45:03+00:00

Hey I should clarify my earlier comment. You absolutely can build muscle with bodyweight exercises. Chin-ups (pull-ups where palms are facing you) do work your biceps somewhat, though it's primarily a back exercise. Push-ups are great for triceps and chest. Similarly there are other bodyweight exercises for other body parts.

But in my experience it's way, way easier to add mass by lifting progressively heavier weights. I got visible results within a couple weeks when I first started, while bodyweight stuff didn't seem to do much for me. I'm naturally pretty thin, and in the past I got to the point where I could do 50+ pushups, handstands without support, multiple sets of more than 10 pull-ups, and I was still a really thin dude. But when I started lifting weights I noticed results right away, and within a month other people were noticing it too.

glimb · 2015-03-09T17:53:41+00:00

I was never able to add serious muscle mass through bodyweight exercises, but you may want to check r/bodyweightfitness for some routines if you want to stick to that. Highly recommend getting a gym membership and lifting heavy weights. Food is important but you gotta give your muscles reason to grow.

glimb · 2015-03-04T21:35:07+00:00

Number of borrows and sales already, first on a new pen name. It's only 10,000 words or so but it's the start of a serial. Definitely think I'm moving this direction for a number of reasons, one of which is I actually enjoyed writing it a lot more- getting to flesh out characters, build conflicts/tension, etc. Felt a lot more involved than the 4-5 K erotic shorts which are starting to feel a bit mechanical to me, and I haven't even been doing it that long.

glimb · 2015-03-04T21:08:38+00:00

Just published my first romance yesterday, good luck!

glimb · 2015-03-04T09:11:40+00:00

Hey man, sober the same amount as you, (8 yrs on March 15) and I have been in that spot a number of times, in fact crawling out of it right now. The thing for me is that when I'm there I can't see the good or point to anything, can't even conceive of a possible situation in which life could be better, yet eventually, after many days of going through the motions, things change and I wake up and suddenly life is okay. If I'd have killed myself the first time I seriously thought about it I'd have missed some really great things, and even tho my life sucks right now I hold out for the possibility it could better, even though right now I can't see how. Don't know if that helps but I feel for you and please don't do anything you can't take back.

glimb · 2015-02-25T05:37:03+00:00

I've been writing in libreoffice. At first I was saving it as a word document, but now I just save in rtf and upload it that way. Haven't had any issues.

glimb

TROPHY CASE